


First, Do No Harm

by hellkitty



Category: Elysium (2013)
Genre: Amputation, Community: spook_me, Dark, Gen, Medical Trauma, Mutilation, Spook Me Multi-Fandom Halloween Ficathon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-26
Updated: 2013-10-26
Packaged: 2017-12-30 12:21:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,164
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1018547
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hellkitty/pseuds/hellkitty
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For a teaser, let's just say there's a reason Sandro works for Spider: his former boss was much, much worse. </p><p>NOTES: For Spook-Me 2013, prompts were:<br/>Creature: Evil Scientist<br/><a href="http://i879.photobucket.com/albums/ab353/spook_me/Spook_Me%20Tarot%20Cards/fradella-adventure-02614_zpsafb5fa43.jpg"> Tarot Card 1</a><br/><a href="http://i879.photobucket.com/albums/ab353/spook_me/Spook_Me%20Tarot%20Cards/05-Major-Hierophant_zps9ef5721c.jpg"> Tarot Card 2</a></p><p>Warnings: Dark, guro, amputation, and a metric fuckton of headcanon.  Pre-canon by a few years.   Here are the canon facts in the movie: There’s a character named Sandro, who performs surgery for Spider.</p>
            </blockquote>





	First, Do No Harm

09.10.2148 0535H Local

First, do no harm. Sandro laughed, bitterly, tipping his head up to blow a mouthful of smoke at the smog-yellow sky. He remembered his abuela telling him, her brown face wrinkled in lines that said she used to smile a lot, that sunrise over Los Angeles used to be beautiful. 

Used to be, maybe.  Not anymore.  And not today: everything already looked old, over-etched, and the day’s heat hadn’t even started to build.

Shit. It was still only dawn, and it was already the worst day of Sandro’s life. 

08.10.2148 1455H Local

His real name was Naismeth, but the streets called him Mengele, and he took the nickname as a sort of compliment, using it himself, from time to time, with a boisterous, flush-faced laugh.

Sandro didn’t think it was that funny. The only reason Sandro got the reference at all was that they’d studied American History the year after his dad had sat him down and scorched his ears about, just for once in your fucking life, Sandro, try to be a big brother to Milo. 

Milo.  Milagro.  He’d been a shitty big brother, even when he had been trying, and once he figured that out, well, it was just easier to stop even trying.  Failure felt worse when you fucking cared about it.

He remembered being a little kid, a real little kid, barely even in school at all, at that age where all teachers are red-faced old women with arm flab that jiggled out from their flowery dresses, when Mama got stabbed.

It was the kind of crime that was so common in LA that it didn’t even make the news, unless you really scoured the police blotters, but when  you’re six, when you hear that someone stabbed your mother in the stomach while she was working her graveyard shift in the convenience store, it becomes the crime of the century to you. And when she survived, and the baby, well...it was a miracle.

Milagro. 

The special one, the baby, the one pampered and held to be the hope of the family, the one who was going to make it, get out of the favelas, and into something like a better life.  The one who followed Sandro slavishly, the one who’s foolish gesture of affection had been the breaking point: Sandro could still remember his father’s angry roar at the little tattoo--nothing big, a tiny lizard squirming its way over Milo’s skinny teen wrist--and Milo sitting there, blubbering that he got it because he wanted to be like Sandro.

Like Sandro was something anyone should ever want to fucking be.

Naismeth smirked at him, tapping one gnarled hand on the top of the sheet that covered some sort of lumpy mass on the rust-spotted gurney.  “Today,” his mouth split into its broad grin, drawling the words with that thick accent he called Texan, “we have us a challenge.” 

Sandro didn’t like challenges. He never had.  School for him was one big game of false enthusiasm, students trying to get big numbers on tests like they’d convinced themselves that numbers mattered, that the stupid word problems about some guy buying fucking stupid bags of mixed nuts, or he’s six feet tall and walking away from a lamp post and how fast is his shadow going to be growing, all sorts of shit that just didn’t. really. matter. 

Sure, maybe it did if you had a different kind of life. But in LA?  You were never going to even see half those kinds of nuts in real life, and the times you were going to see a streetlight that actually worked could be counted on one hand.  Challenging yourself to be better than what you knew your future would be like?  Waste of time, waste of energy, waste of hope.

Naismeth nodded, with that sort of oily geniality he had, like he and Sandro were friends. They weren’t friends. “Ya gotta see, Alessandro,” he grinned at the name, as though calling him that was somehow funny, “you ain’t cut out for being cleanup crew. I’ve seen you work. You got a touch--the touch.  You got some training somewhere.”

Sandro froze his face.  Yeah, he’d had some training. Not Naismeth’s business. Just because you noticed, didn't mean you had a fucking right.

The moment stretched; Naismeth’s smile stretching with it, as though Sandro’s silence was a victory.  “Point is, you’re wasted doing clean up. And seriously, son.”  He shifted his weight to one hip. “You really wanna spend the rest of your life doing the shit work?”

It was almost like Mama’s old lectures about his ‘potential’, but different somehow. Mostly because Sandro didn’t believe for a second that Naismeth had his future contentment at heart. There was a way Naismeth would profit from it: he could almost smell it over the piney cologne. 

“What you have in mind?” Play your part, Sandro, play your role.  Because, yeah, he didn’t dig the cleanup work: all the middle of the night wakeups, the rust-walled mildew-upholsteryed van, and the bodies, all the bodies.  Sandro knew, by now, six different ways to make a body disappear, everything from liquid nitrogen promession to lye baths. He’d already outlived two other cleaners, one spilling the nitrogen over his legs and panicking, the other slipping with his machete in a dismemberment, the blade sinking into his thigh. Femoral artery. Fast bleed out, at least, barely enough time to look up at Sandro and say ‘fuck me’ before he toppled over.

“Any hand as steady as yours? I kinda want to see you try a live ‘un.”   Naismeth jerked back part of the sheet, enough to show the waxy pallid once-tan flesh that was suffering bloodloss.  “This guy could use a little help.”

“Can see that.” 

Naismeth stepped back, lifting a bag and resting it near the head of the hunched, twisted figure. “Well. What are you waiting for?”

It was a trick, Sandro realized. A trick to see how much he knew, stir up those old memories, another failure, another disappointment for mama, that court martial that had cost him any chance he’d ever have for a real job. 

How much you want to keep your secrets, Sandro?  Enough to let a guy die?

No. Fuck that. Sandro jerked the bag toward him, popping it open, digging through it with hands that remembered better than his mind did. Bandages, vials of stuff: antibiotics, Ringer’s, morphine….  Syringes, lower down, each snugged with an orange cap.

Yeah. Okay.  Start an IV, Ringer’s, roll him over, see what’s up.  The skin was grey-waxy, he could see that from here, even just the shoulder, jabbing through the ragged shirt, and the blanket wasn't as lumpy as it should be below the waist. 

Sandro reached for a hand, feeling the skin, clammy and heavy, searching for the vein between the last two fingers, on the back of the hand. Just like they’d taught him in Ft Sam.  Too bad actually knowing what to do hadn’t been enough.

And he fell into that other habit, talking to the patient.  “All right, mano, let’s see what the damage is.”  He lifted the sheet and winced. “Fuuuuuck.”  There might have been a face, a recognizable face, before the blunt force happened.  A lot of blunt force, hard enough to starburst skin, the bones shattered to white splinters, then re-driven into the flesh, until the face was reduced to a pulp of blood and twisted flesh and ghastly white bone, one or two teeth sparkling up at him.  Blood had matted into the hair, spiking it into copper-reeking spikes of gore, indeterminate in color.  He might have been good looking, at one point: he might have been a wart-covered hog. It was impossible to tell anything other than whoever had did this to him meant it to be ruinous. 

  
And the leg, the hollowness under the blanket: that had been lost, sheared off, white bone clotted with black, seeping marrow, in a splintered horror beneath the cut in of a rough rope tourniquet. He'd never walk again, most likely.  Jesus. Whoever did this to him wanted him to suffer, knew exactly what he was doing, too. 

He looked up at Naismeth, leaning against the wall, watching. “Fuckin’ trick, man. He’s gone.” Or near enough. He could see a faint pulse, thready, weak, in the throat, a life unraveling itself in butterfly-flutters.

“You just going to give up?” There was more challenge under the words. As if he fuckin’ knew, as if he knew Sandro’s history, echoes of a lifetime of letting others down. 

“What the fuck you expect me to do?”

“Save him.” Casual, taunting. Like anyone was ever saved in LA.

“No one could,” Sandro said. “Short of fuckin’ Elysium.”

“Yeah,” Naismeth said, evenly. “Sure they could fix him in a jiffy up there. But he ain’t up there, and you’re the best chance he’s got.” He tilted his head, amused. “Best get to it, son.”

08.10.2348 2242H Local

Sandro slumped back, exhausted, his shirt clinging to the small of his back, the kind of sweat that had nothing to do with the Los Angeles heat.  He’d done his best, everything they’d taught him, and then a bunch of shit he just made up, things cobbled together from the usual cleaner’s kit, the first aid bag Naismeth had dropped on the gurney. 

He had...no fucking clue if any of it would hold, if the ciproflaxin he still had on IV drip could fight off the infections from the injury. And he knew he’d spent too much time trying to salvage one of the bastard’s eyes, time he’d regretted when the respiration faltered. 

But he was done. At least, he was tapped out, no more ideas, no more energy, his fingers too enervated even to hold a needle, even to hold the capsule of glue he’d used to seal the last wound.

He couldn’t do anything for the face--it was beyond him, utterly, entirely.  The best he could do was clear it out, pick all the slivers of bone, the gnarled roots of teeth, the shattered jaw, covering the mess with a curve of steel made from an old artillery shell.  It wasn’t pretty, but it was better than nothing, better than leaving that raw mass to the air, especially the air in the favelas. 

Through it all, Naismeth watched, his face slipping between a sort of amusement and a keen, predator’s look, studying Sandro, trying to pierce through him. No. Not a predator: a scavenger.

Sandro stopped caring what Naismeth might see, caught up in the job, caught up in...whoever this poor asshole was. He’d clearly come on the wrong end of the gang Sandro worked for, thin like a tweaker, Sandro’s thought, veins blue and half-blown.  It never failed to catch his attention--even when nothing else did--the way you could read someone’s life on their body, deeper than a tattoo, telling far more than any ink could.

All he knew, in the end, as the guy stirred, was that he didn’t want to be him.  Even the demerol wasn’t going to hold back the hard wall of pain.  Only now did it hit him what he’d done: healing? Or sentencing this guy to a life of pain, disfigurement, horror?

“Nice work,” Naismeth said, coming forward, running an exploratory hand along the weld between the mask and the mangled, unrecognizable face. “Seriously, son. I am impressed. Color me impressed.  I mean, I knew you had something in you, but damn. We’re just wasting you as a cleaner, ain’t we?” He drummed his fingers on the guy’s shin. “Wouldn’t you rather, you know, heal?”

It was safer, Sandro thought. You tended to live longer as a gang’s doctor, at least till you pissed off the shotcallers. No toxic solvents, no hands blistered from machete work. Didn’t matter about the other guy, what his life was going to be like. Not his problem. Not his concern. Not his job.

He knew this for what it was, now: a job offer, an interview, a rung up a ladder of promotion he didn’t know he’d been waiting for. Sandro, for once, not fucking everything up. Sandro, for once, not doing just barely enough. 

He’d done all he could.  “Yeah,” he said, almost weakly. 

Regardless that it might not be enough to do the job, despite the fact that no one in their right mind would want to live like Sandro had made him, he’d done, he thought, suddenly, something good. Something right. 

Naismeth leaned over, slapping a companionable hand on Sandro’s shoulder, grinning a grin a wolf would have thought a little too much, his other hand moving to turn up the wrist on the body on the gurney, and Sandro could see the curve of a lizard’s tail, inked along the wrist.  Naismeth caught his eye with a wink. “Fue un milagro, hermano.”

**Author's Note:**

> * Naismeth was originally named Nesset, after Arnfinn Nesset, one of the more notorious ‘angel of death’ type nurses. But I realized I kept writing him as a foreigner and falling back on a bunch of terrible and possibly racist evil scientist stereotypes. I make Naismeth 100% honky-ass Texan and suddenly, SO much easier to write. I don’t know how people who regularly write humans manage to avoid these racial/trope landmines. 
> 
> * Sandro bc gdit Sandro needs fic. Also he looks really astonishingly like the guy I lost my virginity to, way back in the ancient days of yore. No. I have no idea why a guy that hot would have wanted anything to do with me (amateur troglodyte that I am). Sometimes the universe drops wonders on our laps (or parts close by) and I’ve learned it’s best to appreciate those moments rather than question. 
> 
> * There’s a principle in fiction writing known as the iceberg principle--always make up way more than you’d use. I frontloaded a lot of the headcanon, but tried to strip away as much as possible in revision, but man, just know there’s tons. 
> 
> * Tell me you didn’t find those mixed nuts algebra problems to be ridiculous? And I realize that by having Sandro bring up related-rates, it means he took Calculus in high school. I think he’s super smart. Just lazy. 
> 
> * This author's note is making me feel old. 
> 
> * I don’t actually speak Spanish. Yeah, you probably figured that out already. The list of languages I don't speak is astonishingly long. 
> 
> * Dear NSA/FBI: When you run a scan of my google searches, this is why I looked up nitrogen promession. ~~I have no such excuse for why I googled 'cute vibrators', though~~


End file.
